"ten foot" buildings, so called on account
of the single story, their height deceptively enhanced by the
superimposition of huge and gaudy signs, one on top of another,
announcing the merits of "Stewart's Amberine Ale," of "Cooley's Oats, the
Digestible Breakfast Food," of graphophones and "spring heeled" shoes,
tobacco, and naphtha soaps. "No, We don't give Trading Stamps, Our
Products are Worth all You Pay." These "ten foot" stores were the
repositories of pianos, automobiles, hardware, and millinery, and
interspersed amongst them were buildings of various heights; The
Bagatelle, where Lise worked, the Wilmot Hotel, office buildings, and an
occasional relic of old Hampton, like that housing the Banner. Here,
during those months when the sun made the asphalt soft, on a scaffolding
spanning the window of the store, might be seen a perspiring young man in
his shirt sleeves chalking up baseball scores for the benefit of a crowd
below. Then came the funereal, liver-coloured, long-windowed Hinckley
Block (1872), and on the corner a modern, glorified drugstore thrusting
forth plate glass bays--two on Faber Street and three on Stanley--filled
with cameras and candy, hot water bags, throat sprays, catarrh and kidney
cures, calendars, fountain pens, stationery, and handy alcohol lamps.
Flanking the sidewalks, symbolizing and completing the heterogeneous and
bewildering effect of the street were long rows of heavy hemlock trunks,
unpainted and stripped of bark, with crosstrees bearing webs of wires.
Trolley cars rattled along, banging their gongs, trucks rumbled across
the tracks, automobiles uttered frenzied screeches behind startled
pedestrians. Janet was always galvanized into alertness here, Faber
Street being no place to dream. By night an endless procession moved up
one sidewalk and down another, staring hypnotically at the flash-in and
flash-out electric, signs that kept the breakfast foods and ales, the
safety razors, soaps, and soups incessantly in the minds of a fickle
public.

Two blocks from Faber Street was the North Canal, with a granite-paved
roadway between it and the monotonous row of company boarding houses.
Even in bright weather Janet felt a sense of oppression here; on dark,
misty mornings the stern, huge battlements of the mills lining the
farther bank were menacing indeed, bristling with projections, towers,
and chimneys, flanked by heavy walls. Had her experience included Europe,
her imagination might ha